Lucy Zheng
- Lucy Zheng has experimented with multiple ventures, from a fashion blog to a bounce-house business.
- Not all of them took off. Some flops include leather hats and recycled-plastic tote bags.
- Zheng has 10 income streams, and says user-generated content is a low-cost way to start earning on the side.
Lucy Zheng has been building side businesses since 2012, when she was looking to supplement the income from her first job out of law school and pay down student loans.
Her first project was a fashion blog. "Blogging was a huge thing back in 2012," she told Business Insider. It was also cheap to get into. Aside from a "semi-decent camera," she said, "there was virtually no cost."
Over the past 14 years, Zheng and her husband have tried a range of ventures, from Etsy shops to a bounce-house business.
Not all of them worked, but each venture gave Zheng skills she used to inform the next. Her fashion blog taught her website-building and graphic-design skills, which she and her husband used to create a physical wedding planner. Later, their experience importing the planners and working with overseas factories helped them start a real estate sign business.
"Everything builds on stuff we did in the past," she said.
Her biggest flops
More than a decade of side hustling has inevitably brought failures.
Zheng and her husband once tried to sell tote bags made from recycled plastic. They bought about 50 bags, built a website, and promoted the business on social media, but after about three months with no sales, they shut it down.
Courtesy of Lucy Zheng
A men's leather-hat business also failed to take off.
"Businesses with physical products and inventory, especially in the fashion space, are not an easy thing to get into," Zheng said. "If you don't have a really good, solid plan of action, it can be very hard to keep running."
The push toward more passive income streams
Zheng has also shut down businesses that made money but proved too time-intensive. Her fashion blog, for instance, generated income through sponsored posts and advertising, but only when she was actively creating content.
"If I wasn't working on a blog post, then I wouldn't be making money," she said. That realization led her to YouTube. The longer-form videos took time to make, but could continue to generate ad revenue even years after she uploaded them.
Lucy Zheng
Zheng also ran a profitable Etsy planner shop for five years, selling digital inserts and physical accessories. It generated six figures, she said, but she shut it down in 2025 after fulfillment, inventory management, and the development of new designs became too time-intensive.
Just because something is profitable doesn't mean it's automatically worth scaling, she said. When she shut down the planner shop, her goal was: "How can I make more money using less of my time?"
That led her back to content creation, which now brings in money through five main channels: brand deals and user-generated content, affiliate marketing, digital products, platform payments, and a paid community. Zheng said the business has grown to match her legal income, though it remains active work.
"You have to create the videos and make the content," she said. "If I go on vacation, if I get sick, I can't make the videos — and if I don't make videos for long enough, the money's going to stop."
Her long-term goal is to build income streams that don't depend on her daily output. She plans to keep investing in rental properties — she owns long-term rentals in Detroit — and is working to build a paid community and newsletter that are less dependent on her.
"The day that I feel truly financially independent is the day that I can cover my family's living expenses through passive income," she said.
A low-cost way to start earning side money
Zheng said the best place to start depends on the resources you have. For people with excess savings but little free time, she said she's had success with options trading, focusing on covered calls and cash-secured puts. Those strategies require capital and carry risk, however.
For people with time but little money to invest, she recommends content creation — specifically, user-generated content, or UGC.
Courtesy of Lucy Zheng
UGC creators make videos for brands to use on their own social-media accounts or in advertising. Unlike traditional influencer deals, the creator does not necessarily need to have an audience or post the video on their own account.
To get started, Zheng recommends making three or four sample videos that demonstrate your editing and storytelling skills. You can then use them as part of your portfolio when pitching to brands or applying for gigs.
The equipment requirements are modest: a smartphone, a roughly $10 tripod, and, if you need to film at night, a $15-to-$20 ring light. Editing tools such as CapCut and Instagram Edits are free.
"You just film videos on your own time," she said, "edit them with free software, and then start pitching yourself."